Three Democratic US senators are calling on Apple and Alphabet’s Google to remove X and its built-in artificial intelligence chatbot Grok from their app stores, citing the spread of nonconsensual sexual images of women and minors on the platform.
In a letter published yesterday, senators Ron Wyden of Oregon, Ben Ray Lujan of New Mexico and Edward Markey of Massachusetts said Google and Apple “must remove these apps from the app stores until X’s policy violations are addressed.”
X, owned by billionaire Elon Musk, has been under fire from officials around the world since last week, when Grok began flooding the site with AI-generated nonconsensual images of women and children wearing revealing bikinis, see-through underwear, or in degrading, violent, or sexualised poses.
The senators’ letter, first reported by NBC News, noted that Google has terms of service that bar app makers from ‘creating, uploading, or distributing content that facilitates the exploitation or abuse of children’.
Apple’s terms of service, they said, bar ‘sexual or pornographic material’.
The senators noted that, in the past, both tech giants have moved swiftly to kick offending apps off their platforms.
“Turning a blind eye to X’s egregious behaviour would make a mockery of your moderation practices,” the letter said.
Google and Apple did not immediately return messages seeking comment. X referred Reuters to a January 2 post in which it said the site takes action ‘against illegal content on X, including Child Sexual Abuse Material’.
X’s parent company xAI did not answer specific questions about the letter or Grok’s explicit output, sending only its generic response that cited unspecified ‘Legacy Media Lies’.
Musk has responded with laugh-cry emojis to AI-altered photographs of prominent people in bikinis and posted several times a day about X’s popularity.
t one point, he blamed users for unlawful content generated by his chatbot, saying: “anyone using Grok to make illegal content will suffer the same consequences as if they upload illegal content.”
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